You are talking jibberish man.
If you can make a longer chain and break bitcoin, prove it.

The way I see it, there needs to be some sort of "official" or consensus set of parameters and rules that a block chain needs to obey.

Otherwise, if the only requirement for acceptance was chain length, someone could just arbitrarily change the rules, say, that 1000 coins are awarded instead of 50 every time a block is solved.

Right now, this "official" set of rules comes from satoshi, and you are quite right, if he changed the source code to his own personal advantage (and to the disadvantage of other users), he could probably manage to rip off a few people, simply because this is a very early stage in this project and most people automatically download from sourceforge as soon as a new version is realeased.

But that would be a one-off. People would no longer trust either satoshi or sourceforge, and some other consensus would soon emerge. After that, satoshi couldn't change the rules even if he wanted to.

Its one thing to say these things its another to actually do it.

Thanks for that.

Id still like to encourage him to post what he has come up with. You dont want to scare away people who think there is a major issue.

I think so too, but as of now, nobody has come up with a valid and sensible answer about why parts of the blockchain are locked by the standard client.

The possible answers are :
 1. In order to prevent some possible unknown vulnerability
 2. In order to prevent some government to overtake bitcoin instantly
 2. In order to cover-up for some known but not published vulnerability of the protocol


Since, in my understanding, the protocol itself does not allow any other vulnerability than "beat me up with boatloads of CPU power" (which in my opinion is a feature, not a vulnerability) such an extra unneeded lock-up seems kindof suspicious.

So I'm still waiting for a sensible explanation; if the protocol is as secure as I think it is, the lock is not needed. If the protocol is not that secure, then some exploit needs to get published and the protocol fixed.

Either tentative is just trolling and trying to manipulate the market, or he needs to post some facts or outline of an exploit.

Thanks, noag, but it's perfectly reasonable for people to be skeptical until they hear the details.

Yes, ribuck, you are correct, but you're missing my point.

My point is that the lock-in system eliminates the p2p aspect of bitcoin.

Let's say at some point the network gets split into 2 unconnected parts.
That causes some known issues of double spending and such,
but all these issues are supposed to be temporary.
They will be fixed once the parts get connected again.

But now let's say that during the period of separation satoshi decides on another lock-in point.
Let's say he's in the smaller part of the network, and has the shorter chain.
Now either a) the shorter chain permanently becomes the official one, which is biased towards satoshi's node,
or b) someone with the longer chain has to appeal to the central authority of sourceforge to fix this.

Of course the chances of every developer (who bothers to check) being in the smaller part are low.
But that still leaves us with a committee-managed system, not p2p.

One may argue (as some here have) that every open source is managed by the committee of involved developers.
But that should only be so for the design and implementation of the system, not for its entire operation!
For comparison, imagine the developers of bittorrent hardcoding into the client a blacklist of fake torrents.
What a disaster that would be.
(Not a perfect analogy, I know.)

Now I'm not urging you to drop the lock-in system,
because that would break the security of the clients.
I was trying to see if redesigning the system to be both p2p and secure (and many other things it should be but isn't)
is something that could catch on.
I think I've learned that people here are too invested in the current system to allow a better one to gain popularity.
Oh well, such is life.

The checks were put in place because there was a bug in an older version of the software and the majority switched to the updated version. If you have solutions for what you are saying lets hear them.


As long as the majority decide to change it doesnt matter what satoshi or anyone else does....but there needs to be a good reason to scrap what exists now.

Yes they will. That doesnt mean a better implementation couldnt be taken up by the majority . Theres nothing stopping anyone from creating a separate project and if people think its better they will use it.

I think your "possible answer number 1" is the right one, but the vulnerability being protected against isn't in the protocol. The protection is against programming errors, to limit the disruption if a bug is discovered and exploited.

Satoshi added it in the immediate aftermath of the discovery of the overflow bug.